2263: Fuck This Culture War; Everyone Needs to Rebuild

This is the “earliest” I’ve ever posted on here, at 12:22AM (edit: now 1:19AM, it’s taken an hour to write all this crap), and since I haven’t been to bed yet it’s technically still “yesterday” so far as the original rules of #oneaday go, but I wanted to address this subject immediately while it was fresh in my mind, so here I go breaking with convention somewhat.

Today, Alison Rapp got fired from Nintendo. If you don’t know who Alison Rapp is or why she got fired, I’d urge you not to look into it; it’s a complicated, messy situation that everyone involved could have probably handled better — but it also, after a certain point, became a bit of an inevitable outcome to just one of many shitstorms the games industry has already endured in just the first three months of this year.

The matter of Rapp is a symptom of a much larger problem that has been rumbling away for the last few years now: a so-called “culture war” between two somewhat ill-defined sides whose edges have a tendency to blur into one another somewhat. It’s a whole world of hypocrisy, kneejerk overreactions, dogpiling and public shaming, and it’s made the Internet an altogether far more unpleasant place to be than the “global village” it was once positioned as.

The culture war in question is broader than the field of games, but it’s in gaming that it’s perhaps most clear to see. Described by commentators via the gross (and erroneous) oversimplification that it is a battle between “GamerGate” and “SJWs”, the conflict is primarily between people who claim to be in favour of free speech, against censorship and against public shaming of politically incorrect viewpoints, humour or creative material, and people who claim to be in favour of increased diversity in culture, improving the representation of women, homosexual people, transgender people, people from non-white, non-English-speaking cultures and any number of other minorities you might care to mention.

Fundamentally, both “sides” have good points, and both sides actually also have a lot in common. The “free speech” side are all in favour of diversity — they just don’t want it to come at the expense of the ability for traditionally privileged groups to be able to speak their mind as well, which is perhaps a valid concern, given the number of people on the “diversity” side who will explicitly state that they reject the opinions of white men, regardless of how much merit they might have. Conversely, the “diversity” side are also in favour of free speech — that’s the core of the diversity they’re fighting for, in fact: the ability for everyone, regardless of social, cultural, sexual, gender…al background, to be able to speak their mind, make the creative works they want to make and celebrate them.

Unfortunately, something went wrong somewhere along the line. The origins of the GamerGate controversy amid the tell-all blogpost of relatively unknown indie developer Zoe Quinn’s ex-boyfriend — as well as accusations that aspects of her personal life had given her TWINE game Depression Quest rather more favourable coverage than it would have otherwise garnered — gave the “diversity” crowd a considerable amount of what they saw as ammunition to prove that “gamers” — inasmuch as that is a coherent group, which it absolutely 100% isn’t — were misogynistic harassers keen to drive women out of gaming, which was something they’d been trying to argue for a couple of years already. “Gamers”, meanwhile, hit back, quite rightly resenting the implications that they were a bunch of woman-hating fuckheads who wanted to play nothing but brown guntastic dudebro sims where people say “bitch” a lot.

No-one came out of this looking good. Quinn’s name was dragged through the mud — whether it was justifiably so or not, I can’t say for sure, though I must admit my few sightings of her on social media had always rubbed me up the wrong way — but at the same time, an entire group of people whose only common factor was a shared hobby that they all loved — and yes, that group includes men, women, straight people, gay people, cis people, trans people, black people, white people, Asian people, Latino people and any other arbitrary denominations you’d care to come up with — came under attack from people who decided that they knew better, and that they knew how the world should behave. And the conflict then proceeded to escalate, and now it’s been going on for several years — and yes, this nonsense did start before “GamerGate” ever became a thing… remember the Mass Effect 3 controversy?

There’s a lot more to it than all this, but I don’t want to get bogged down in details, largely because I’ve only really casually observed from the sidelines while all this has been going down and can’t speak with any great authority on what’s been going on in either camp.

What I can talk about, however, is the overwhelmingly negative effect that the last few years has had on gaming culture as a whole, because it fucking sucks. It really does. As someone who loves games, and has done since he was a small boy; as someone who loves talking about games, and writing about games, and telling all his friends about games they’ve never heard of… it really, really fucking sucks.

This “culture war” we’re living is not conducive to social progress, nor is it in any way making the games industry a better place for anyone. Why? Because both sides want it their way and no other way. Compromise is off the table, and opinions are firmly entrenched. GamerGate bad, progressiveness good. Unless you’re involved in GamerGate, in which case GamerGate good-but-misunderstood, SJWs bad. Proceed to yelling at one another, making unpleasant attacks on each other and, if you’re Graham Linehan, trawling through a young man’s Facebook photos to find a picture of him with his mother to ask him if “she would be proud” of how he behaves online, simply because they are on opposing “sides” of this nonsense. (Yes, this really happened.)

There’s no nuance in this discussion. No acknowledgement that both sides have good points — the progressives take things too far with their claims of “diversity” inevitably just veering into overcompensating “oppression of the privileged” territory while crying “GamerGate did it!” any time something bad happens; the free speechers are a little too resistant to things outside their comfort zone, consistently refusing to accept games like Gone Home as “real games” because they don’t conform to arbitrary guidelines of what is acceptable in the medium — and no attempts to understand one another. Battle lines are drawn. Weapons of choice are snarky comments fired from deep in the trenches of the Internet, escalating to insults and name-calling, and in some cases even to having tangible effects on aspects of people’s “real” lives, like their jobs and family.

And no-one will admit that this “culture war” is all a big steaming pile of shit that is just causing culture as a whole to stagnate. All we’re achieving is making individual subcultures within the “gamer” umbrella become more and more isolated and insular from one another, when what we should be doing is encouraging cross-pollination and exploration of games from outside your comfort zone.

And make no mistake, no-one is blameless in this. The whiny channer who bitches about “walking simulators” and how they’re bullshit is no better than the whiny Kotaku writer who bitches about how Senran Kagura’s boobies make him feel uncomfortable. The Redditor who cries “censorship!” over changes to a game’s script in localisation is no better than the forum poster who complains to Blizzard that he’s upset he has to see a lady’s bottom in tight pants. The feminist who claims everyone against her opinions is an “MRA” is no better than the actual MRAs who believe in feminist conspiracies. Get it? Fuck all of this conflict; none of it achieves anything whatsoever except making the people who just want to get on with their lives and enjoy the things they love completely and utterly fucking miserable.

Yes, I am talking about myself here. I have friends on both “sides” of this debacle, and I’m terrified of them interacting with one another, or of any of them believing me to be one “side” or the other for fear of being ostracised. I’m already a bit of a hermit; I don’t need to lose friends over something that I really don’t want to get involved in. But I am losing friends; there are people I don’t feel comfortable talking to online any more because I know that they’d believe my opinions to be “wrong” in comparison to them, and there are people I just don’t want to associate with any more because they appear to have turned into dribbling, rabid, irrational psychopaths who simply won’t listen to reason.

All I want — and I realise saying this here is just pissing in the wind, but regardless — is for people to accept one another for who they are, and what they like.

No shaming people who enjoy Japanese games for being “paedophiles”.

No shaming people who enjoy “walking simulators” for liking “not-games”.

No shaming men for enjoying attractive women in their games.

No shaming creative independent developers for using gaming as an interactive medium for creating works of art.

No shaming writers for depicting things that they don’t necessarily agree with, but want to show.

In fact, no more shaming, full-stop. No more blanket accusations. No more assumptions. Just acceptance. It doesn’t even have to be understanding — I don’t expect everyone I know to understand exactly why titles like the Neptunia series and Senran Kagura mean so much to me, so long as they respect that I feel that way, and don’t call me and the things I love “skeezy” or “gross” or whatever 12 year old girl’s words they’re using this week. I certainly don’t understand why people love, say, The Witness or Crusader Kings 2, but I’m certainly not about to start shaming the people who do, because I’m glad they have those things that they can enjoy while I have things that I can enjoy.

That’s diversity, right there: everyone having something that is “for them”. And the only way to make it better is to make more of everything for everyone — and accept that not every individual thing is aimed at every single individual person. And to accept that this is fine. And perhaps even to occasionally take a look at things you wouldn’t normally consider just out of curiosity — all in the name of understanding.

Culture becomes richer and more interesting when its smaller subdivisions are able to go off and do their own thing in peace, occasionally crossing boundaries and drawing influences from one another, or at least recognising, contrasting and celebrating the things we do similarly and differently from one another. That’s the exact opposite of what we have right now; currently, our smaller subdivisions in culture are erecting 30-foot tall barbed wire fences and firing artillery shells full of shit over the top of them.

So fuck this culture war. Fuck all the arguments I’m seeing on Twitter right now. Fuck the people who think that yelling “GamerGate did it!” or “SJWs did it!” is more important than enjoying this hobby that we all supposedly love so much. I want to go back to a time where anyone can post something about a cool new game they’ve tried out, and not have to worry about someone, somewhere getting offended or insulting them for it. I want to go back to a time when the press didn’t hate its readers, and the readers didn’t distrust the press. I want to go back to a time when Japan’s weirdness was regarded as something people wanted to explore and find out more about, rather than get skeeved out by. I want to go back to a time when weird, experimental games were cool and exciting rather than “blargh, not another pretentious indie game”.

Basically I think I probably want early ’00s-era 1up.com back.

But sadly, I’m not sure we’re ever going to get days like that back.

Oh well, all I can attempt to do, at least, is attempt to be the change I want to see in the world. Hopefully a little positivity will go a long way.

Now I’m going to bed. Please be a better place in the morning, world.

1607: Future Unwritten

I had a job interview today. I feel like I should talk about that a bit, but then I’ve not been mentioning it much on social media — largely due to superstition about “jinxing” it — and so I won’t talk about it in detail for now. (I hear whether I have another interview next week; I may say something more then.)

What I do want to talk about is the fact that said job isn’t involved in the games press, or indeed anywhere in the games industry. It is in something completely unrelated that just happens to use my skills at using content management systems for editing digital content in a productive manner. It’s for a large company and would involve me working at the site for said company rather than at home, so all around it will be a fairly significant change to how my life and career have been unfolding for the past four or five years.

So why am I leaving the games press behind, when those of you who know me well will know it’s something I wanted to do for most of my life? Well, the chief reason is that the games press of 2014 is not the same as the games press I initially gazed at with admiration back in the ’80s and ’90s. The industry has moved almost entirely to the Internet, for one thing — a few magazines do still exist, but their relevance is declining — and, as such, so has the way of working.

The rise of the Internet has led to an explosion of games press outlets. Because it’s so easy to get a website up and running, pretty much anyone can open a games site if they want to; whether or not it will become successful is another matter entirely, but the sheer volume of people writing about games on the Internet is ridiculous.

And yet I don’t feel like there’s anything near the diversity of character that the old magazines had. When I think back to the edgy humour of Atari ST magazine Zero; the informative multi-format coverage of Advanced Computer Entertainment; the distinctly “British-feeling” PC Zone, I don’t feel like we have anything quite like that in the modern games press. There are individual personalities who people like to follow around the Internet, for sure, but when was the last time you read something like Charlie Brooker’s contributions to PC Zone, one notable example of which was an entire preview written in third-person perspective Franglais? (Fade to Black, as I recall.) When was the last time you read a boxout on a site about the fact they don’t have Teletext in America? (Found on an Alpha Centauri preview, if I remember correctly.) If Half-Life 3 came out tomorrow, how many sites would devote a few words to a boxout listing “other famous Gordons” as PC Zone did with its review of the original?

I feel a lot of that character has been lost. The modern games press is probably more “professional” (for want of a better word) but it’s also become a whole lot more boring and predictable. The big sites, these days, are all but interchangeable in terms of what games get covered when; thanks to press embargoes on previews and reviews, everyone publishes their thoughts on particular games at the same time, meaning there’s often relatively little reason to look at more than one place, whereas seeing different magazines’ approaches to games coverage used to be a real joy.

The chief reason I’m in no hurry to go back, though, is the volatility of the industry. Over the course of the past four years, I’ve worked for a number of different outlets, some of which you may have heard of, some of which you might not have — Kombo, Daily Joypad, Good Old Games, IGN, GamePro, Inside Network and, most recently, USgamer. In each of those positions there wasn’t a whole lot of progression or advancement opportunities; games press positions are like gold dust, so a lot of people tend to stay where they are for as long as possible unless a significantly better offer comes along, which leads to a lot of positions stagnating somewhat. On top of all that, the aforementioned volatility of the industry meant that sometimes you come downstairs to start work only to discover an email announcing that the site you’ve been working on is to close, and that you’ll be out of a job — or that you’re surplus to requirements and no longer needed. (Yes, I am speaking from personal experience on both counts.)

This has happened several times throughout my career, each time through no fault of my own — and I really mean that; I’m a hard, dedicated worker, and any of my past employers would happily back me up on that. Every time it’s happened it’s meant that I’ve effectively had to start again from scratch — because I held one position for some time at the previous post, that’s what I’d end up doing at the next, and so the whole lack of progression thing perpetuated itself somewhat, because by the time I thought I should be advancing — and probably would have been advancing in a “normal” (i.e. stable) job — I was, instead, scouring the Help Wanted ads for where I’d be going next.

I’ve been speaking selfishly so far, but I’m far from the only one affected by this sort of thing. Just today, for example, the day after E3 — the biggest event in the games industry calendar — GameTrailers, one of the biggest video game video sites in the world, laid off a whole bunch of staff. How is that happening in an industry that, in money terms, is taking on movies and winning? How is it that one of the biggest creative mediums in the world right now can’t provide job security for anyone involved in it — whether you’re a member of the press, a developer, an artist or anyone else?

I’m tired of it, to be perfectly blunt. I’ve bought a house with Andie, and I want to be able to live my life without having to worry about whether I’ll still have a pay packet at the end of each month. I want to be able to have a job that I can build into a career; a position where I can learn new things, advance, take on new responsibilities and, most importantly, come home at the end of the day and forget all about until I go back the next day. Video games, as much as I love them and as big a part of my life as they will always be, are not providing that right now, so it is time for me to look elsewhere.

I worry that these feelings are coming too late. At 33 years of age, I’m no longer a fresh-out-of-university graduate, and I worry that prospective employers will see my fragmented work history and wonder what I’ve been playing at for the past 10+ years. Still, you can’t turn back the clock, so all I can do is try my best and see where life takes me next.

1578: Games Journalism is Broken

And I’m not going to fix it. I’m not sure anyone can.

I mention this amid the news that Future, one of the biggest publishing companies in the UK that has been around for as long as I can remember, is having severe difficulties. Difficulties that are serious enough to see it considering the closure of CVG (aka Computer and Video Games), one of the longest-running brands in the games press. Future’s woes aren’t solely to do with the games press side of its operation, of course — indeed, it is apparently intending to keep PC Gamer, Gamesradar and the new (somewhat redundant) Kotaku UK up and running regardless of what else happens — but the company’s situation, particularly with regard to the games press, is not at all unusual. I was let go from my position at USgamer recently, as you’ll know if you’ve been keeping up to date with this blog, and I believe Destructoid also lost some people recently, too.

It’s getting beyond a joke now. The video games industry is one of the most lively, vibrant and exciting creative sectors right now; a business that nowadays regularly puts the amount of money thrown about in movies and music to shame. Over the course of the last 30+ years, it’s grown from something that nerds do alone in their bedroom — an activity to be ashamed of — to something that absolutely anyone can engage with on one level or another. Thanks to the rise of smartphones and tablets, there are more “gamers” out there than ever before, but even not taking this rapidly growing market into account, computers, consoles and handhelds are providing more diverse, more interesting, more creative experiences than at any other time in the history of interactive entertainment.

So why is the games press a business that seemingly finds it impossible to remain stable for more than a year or two at a time? Why is the games press such a volatile sector that hard-working individuals (like me, the CVG lot whose jobs are at risk, and any number of other people who have lost their jobs recently) regularly have to effectively start their career over again time after time? How are people who have given up a lot to be a part of this business that they feel so strongly about supposed to build a career and progress?

Part of the reason is the very nature of the Web. People aren’t accustomed to paying for content, so they won’t pay for it. This means that sites have to rely on lowest-common-denominator ad-based revenue, which in turn leads to a decline in the overall quality of content as producing work that shows up high in the search engine rankings or which provides answers to the most vapid of questions becomes a priority for sites. There are rare exceptions — a well-written piece from an established writer can attract a goodly degree of traffic and, consequently, revenue, as can something controversial or which exploits the hot-button topics of the day — but they’re just that: exceptions. For the most part, it’s all about the daily churn: getting as much content as possible out as quickly as possible; a far cry, to be sure, from the magazine model of the pre-Internet days.

And you know what? I’m getting to the stage where I feel like I’m done. I love writing about games. Love it. But it doesn’t feel like it’s possible to make it into a career any more, and it certainly doesn’t feel like it’s possible to make a career out of writing about the most interesting niches of the industry. I’ve been doing the same thing in the business for four years now, largely because I’ve had to reboot my career and start over several times. I’m 33 years old; I can’t keep doing that, and I can’t go back to begging for scraps on a freelance basis, no disrespect intended to anyone who does successfully manage to draw a living wage through that way of working.

And so, I find myself increasingly wondering whether or not if, should a fantastic-sounding job offer for a video games site find itself in my inbox tonight or tomorrow, I would take it. At this exact moment — 22:42 on a Thursday night in May 2014 — I’m erring towards “no”. It would be wonderful to have the guarantee of a new job in this sector that I love, but I’d constantly be wondering if, a year or two down the line, I’d be in the exact same position I am now: never advancing; never progressing; never learning anything new.

A career in video games sounds like a dream come true to most people who grew up with them. But I can tell you, it’s not everything you might hope. In fact, there are a lot of times when it really, really sucks, and it seems like the spring of 2014 is one of those times.

My best wishes to everyone who, like me, is going through a tough time right now. May we all land on our feet and find ourselves doing something where our skills are truly valued and appropriately compensated.

1548: Sell-Out

This is probably going to sound like a terribly “inside baseball” post, but I feel the need to vent a little, so apologies in advance.

I am absolutely sick of the lack of respect given to my profession — games critic, games journalist, person who writes about games, whatever you want to call it — and I am likewise sick of the daily drama that accompanies it, particularly on the UK/European side of things. It’s getting extremely tiresome to put up with the daily snark, outrage and condemnation of this, that or the other, and I really can’t help feeling that ultimately all it does is distract from the reasons most of us got into this business in the first place: loving games.

Whether it’s someone using the infuriating scare quotes around the job title “journalist” (as in “so-called games ‘journalists'”), the regular (and, to my knowledge, usually unjustified) accusations of bribery, corruption and otherwise unethical behaviour or the current favourite of the social justice crowd, complaining whenever a white man writes something, you sometimes have to wonder why people put up with this shit. And indeed some don’t. And I can’t say I blame them.

I’ve been quite fortunate throughout my career in that there’s only been one real occasion where I became a little uncomfortable as a result of the behaviour of a reader or community member. That was back on GamePro, when the GamePro Facebook page was frequented by a rather strange individual who didn’t believe in debit cards and had some peculiar political ideas. He was harmless for the most part, until I posted a piece about an interesting-sounding game developed by a university that promised to explore matters of sexuality and gender. He exploded in a fit of rage; forced to confront things that clearly didn’t fit in with his rather narrow-minded view of the world, he became extremely aggressive and unpleasant, and for the first time I felt a little afraid of the Internet. (The second time I was afraid of the Internet has been well-documented on these pages, but that was nothing to do with work.)

The latest incident in Games Industry Drama involved a recent press event for Ubisoft’s upcoming game Watch Dogs in which attendees were reportedly given a free Nexus 7 — a decent Android tablet. Predictably, this quickly descended into people condemning the people who had accepted them and people arguing about “ethics”, while at the same time NeoGAF was doing its usual thing of whingeing about how game journalists are all paid off and how no-one writes “objective” reviews. (Hahaha.)

It is exhausting to have to process all this sort of thing on a daily basis. I write about games for one reason and one reason only. (Well, two if you count the paycheque.) I write about games because I love writing about games. No other reason. I’m not trying to change the world. I’m not trying to make people rise up and fight against oppressive powers. I’m not trying to make people confront things they’re uncomfortable with. And perhaps I should be doing those things. But I’m not. The reason I write about games is because I love writing about games, and because I love games.

When I come across a brilliant game I love that few people are talking about, the first thing I think about is how I might be able to write about it in a way that gets my passion and enthusiasm across. These are experiences I want to share with people; experiences I want other people to be able to have. And if just one person reads something I’ve written and thinks “hmm, that sounds interesting; maybe I’ll check it out!” then I’m happy.

But if just one person rolls up and calls me a sellout or calls my integrity into question, that sucks. Fortunately I haven’t had to deal with that particular issue in my career, but seeing it constantly going on all around me on a seemingly daily basis is just exhausting. Sometimes I wish everyone would just shut the fuck up and just enjoy themselves for once.

And I realise that by writing this I’m simply contributing to the noise. But it needed to get out of my brain and on to the page. And now I’m done. I’m off to go and play either Final Fantasy XIV or Demon Gaze and not look at social media for the rest of the day.

#oneaday Day 745: Miss Catherine O’Gyny

I’ve been rather disappointed by the attitudes I’ve seen over the last couple of days, from people who, though in many cases I’ve not had the opportunity to speak to directly, I would consider to be my peers — those working in the game journalism business, and specifically those from the UK.

What I’m referring to here isn’t a blanket problem with all UK game journalists or the industry at large, but it is a relatively widespread one, and one which I don’t particularly want to get into direct finger-pointing about. I do, however, feel that it is worth mentioning.

Context: Last night there was a launch party for the impending UK release of Atlus’ excellent Catherine. If you’re not familiar with Catherine, it’s a bold, daring game that doesn’t shy away from adult themes, and explores the concepts of relationships, commitment, infidelity and the power of sex through well-written dialogue, well-realised characters and some very striking, surreal imagery. Despite its subject matter, it never oversteps the boundary into tastelessness, and the vast majority of the game’s sexuality is implied rather than made explicit.

So of course it would be an excellent idea to launch the game in a strip club. Of course that would be a sensible idea, particularly given that there is no strip club (or indeed any strippers) in the game, which handles sexuality in an understated, tasteful manner which respects the player’s maturity.

Some people on Twitter quite rightly spoke out and said that they felt this venue for the game’s launch was totally inappropriate. Some brought out facts and figures to back up their arguments. But surely even without facts and figures, anyone with half a brain could see that hosting a launch event for a game in a strip club is just a terrible, terrible idea.

Apparently not. The people who raised objections to the venue were told by some attendees that they were taking things too seriously, that they were trying to unfairly tar people with the “sexist” brush, that it wasn’t really anything to worry about. Arguments got heated in many instances. I kept well away from the whole thing and observed — usually the best choice in this sort of situation.

The issue that really bugged me, though, was that for many of those who were at the event — I wasn’t, I hasten to add — it seemed a simple matter to dismiss the inherent misogyny in hosting an event at such a venue. The objectors were accused of “overreacting”.

Fact is, the video games industry has always been male dominated and, despite the number of prominent women who are now involved, is still a male-dominated industry. Hosting events like this is not going to make women (and, indeed, some men) feel welcome to the industry, and from the outside it just looks sleazy — both for the industry at large, and for Catherine, too, which, as a genuinely thought-provoking, mature game for adults, it does not deserve. None of that is an overreaction. The industry needs to be more inclusive.

All this isn’t the first time the reaction of many UK media types has bugged me, however. Late last year, industry trade publication MCV held the Games Media Awards ceremony, during which people from across the industry were to be celebrated for their achievements. It should be a prestigious, high-profile ceremony — and to some extent, it is. However, all trace of credibility for the event was lost for me when I clapped eyes on its Twitter feed, which was encouraging attendees to get as drunk as possible and show up naked, and continually promised “industry boobs” — a supposedly hilarious joke whereby if the account got enough followers, they’d show a picture that actually turned out to be the flabby chest of one of the gentlemen had reviewed the UFC Personal Trainer product for Kinect. IT’S CLEVER BECAUSE IT’S NOT ACTUALLY SEXIST BUT LOOKS LIKE IT IS, DO YOU SEE?

I have always been of the attitude that an awards ceremony should be a professional affair — dinner suits, shiny shoes, that sort of thing. That doesn’t mean that you can’t have a bit of fun with it, but the babbling of the GMAs’ Twitter account really seemed to cross the line with its crass humour, so I happened to mention it one day on Twitter, noting how the behaviour of whoever was running the account had actually put me off wanting to find out more about the ceremony.

I was promptly retweeted and mocked for, again, “taking it too seriously”.

In my experience, “you’re taking it too seriously”, “I didn’t mean it” or “I was just having a laugh” are some of the weakest defences that there are. They show complete disregard for the other person’s feelings and put across the notion that it’s all right to do or say anything you want, so long as it’s “a joke” or not meant to be “taken seriously”. The other person should just lighten up, stop being such a stick-in-the-mud, take the pole out of their arse.

The Games Media Awards got their comeuppance when sponsors Grainger Games ended up acting like a bunch of dicks, however. The hypocrisy of some, who had previously been advocating the crass humour of the Twitter account, now lambasting Grainger Games for its inappropriate behaviour in person was almost amusing.

In the case of the Catherine event, I feel very disappointed in the way many UK journos have behaved. While I’m sure the event offered a great networking opportunity, the fact that it appears no-one saw fit to object to the venue and instead were more than happy to hoover up the free drinks is a bit sad. It’s highly likely that there were some people there — male and female — who would have felt very uncomfortable in that situation, but felt like they would be unable to mention it for fear of ruining the networking opportunity, or the relationship they might have with public relations representative. The fact that those who weren’t there who did object to the venue were promptly called out and, in some cases, ridiculed, is really sad, and the flimsy justifications and excuses offered by those who were in attendance are what I find particularly disappointing.

In order to fight the perception of the games industry as an all-boys’ club in which only twentysomething men can participate, events like this need to stop happening. There’s no good reason the launch couldn’t have taken place at any old bar — but I have a horrible, sleazy, sneaking suspicion that the strip club venue was chosen precisely because it has provoked the discussion it has. You know the saying… “any publicity is good publicity”, right? Would people be as aware of Catherine if all this hadn’t happened?

In short, I just think that the industry is better than this. And if this is the direction that members of the industry think it is appropriate to go in, then I’m more than happy that my current career sits on the sidelines and concentrates more on the analytical, business side of matters rather than flashy, over the top, exclusive events like this.

#oneaday Day 646: The Industry that Won’t Grow Up

Here in the UK, it’s the Games Media Awards this evening, an event run by trade publication MCV — arguably one of the biggest and most reliable sources of industry news in the business. The awards ceremony should be a great honour for those nominated — national recognition for the work you do is something which should be celebrated, and the tireless hours of work that those who work for various publications and websites put in should be rewarded with something like this.

Unfortunately, for me at least, there’s something of a problem: the way these awards are being marketed, particularly on Twitter. Doubtless someone somewhere along the way has been looking at the eternally-bizarre Betfair Poker account and decided that they’d try to do their own “self aware Twitter account” thing for the GMAs. There’s crude humour, promises of “industry boobs” (which — ha ha — turn out to be images of male nipples from a feature on the UFC personal trainer game that came out a while back) and generally very little discussion of the reason the awards actually exist — the games media and the good work they do.

In the last 24 hours, the GMAs Twitter account has encouraged everyone to turn up to the awards ceremony nude, noted that “if by this time tomorrow we’re not unprofessionally drunk, we’re doing something wrong” and publicly ridiculed anyone who decided to speak out against the attitude on display. For me, that doesn’t instil me with a particularly large degree of confidence in the credibility of the awards, however big the sponsors are — and they’re pretty big.

I’m not saying the awards and the way they’re promoted should be po-faced and boring — far from it. But I’d much rather see the industry’s achievements being celebrated than puerile jokes better suited to the playground — great stuff gets written every day, yet in 24 hours of tweets leading up to the announcement of the award winners, precisely one tweet (itself a retweet from a reputable journalist on MCV) called attention to a good piece of work published online. The rest promised boobs, nudity and drunkenness. And while I don’t doubt there will be plenty of drinking at the GMAs ceremony tonight, to revel in it quite so much on the official account seems… I don’t know, inappropriate.

The problem is partly that gaming itself is stuck in a curious cultural position somewhere betwixt “creative medium”, “kids’ toys” and “big business”. The disparate elements aren’t always entirely compatible with one another, and it can often lead to accusations of the industry being “immature” — an argument lent weight by the number of games that fulfil childish (and usually stereotypically male) fantasies such as playing soldiers, flying spaceships and killing monsters.

But the thing is, the industry as a whole does seem very much to want to grow up. The very existence of ceremonies like the BAFTAs for games and even the GMAs themselves suggest that the industry and those who work in it do so desperately want to be taken seriously, to be seen as a worthwhile part of society rather than being regarded in the Daily Mail light of “destroying childhood” and the like. Unfortunately for those people who think talking about boobs and drunkenness on the official account for an awards ceremony is the right thing to do, that means knowing when to turn off the smut and turn on the professionalism — because if you don’t, it simply undermines everything you’re trying to do for the industry and destroys your credibility.

Sadly, though, from what I have seen, I appear to be in a minority in feeling this way — worse, by posting this, it’s entirely possible I’m opening myself up to public ridicule by the account in question itself. Still, if that does happen I think it will prove my point rather aptly.

#oneaday Day 562: If We Haven’t Announced It, It Doesn’t Exist

I don’t agree with everything Ars Technica’s Ben Kuchera writes, but he was right on the money with this piece right here. Marketing plans are starting to rule the world, and not just in the games industry — though given my intimate familiarity with it, that’s what I’ll be particularly focusing on here.

I remember the early days of gaming. There were no carefully-orchestrated reveals, no countdown websites (largely because there were no websites) and no pre-order incentives. And it was good. Sometimes you’d hear through a magazine that developer X had just had a great idea for a new game, and it sounded interesting, but they didn’t have anything to show yet because it was just an idea. That was cool — it gave you an insight into the creative process and didn’t always come to anything. That was cool, too — cancelled games passed into the stuff of legend and became myths.

I’ve been trying to pin down exactly what it is that bugs me about all this, and I think it’s the whole element of “you can’t talk about this until we say so”. Embargoes are the bane of the games journalist, particularly when, as in some cases, you find yourself seeing a game literally months before you’re allowed to publish anything about it. There is absolutely no reason for this to happen in an online world of immediate information — particularly with the growing number of leaks that spring from developers presumably frustrated with the shackles that PR firms place around their necks.

The problem with the whole thing is perhaps best summed up by Gearbox’s Randy Pitchford stating “if we haven’t announced it, it doesn’t exist.” Why on Earth should that be the case? What a way to disrespect your development team, who are probably quite proud of what they’re working on. What a way to insult the intelligence of the public. And what a pointless exercise — in this case it was less than a day between Eurogamer breaking the story that Borderlands 2 was “probably” on the way and Take-Two announcing that Borderlands 2 was on the way. Pitchford called this “shoddy journalism” when in fact it was the exact opposite — reporters should go off-piste from time to time, as they’re not PR mouthpieces — PR mouthpieces are!

As one who reports on the news in the industry, I come face to face with this sort of thing every day. Don’t get me wrong — I very much enjoy reporting on new announcements and helping drum up excitement for new products. There is always something going on in the industry, whether it’s a small developer putting out an interesting-looking iPhone game or a massive publisher announcing a new means through which they’re attempting to bum-burgle used game customers.

I know why it happens of course — it’s so competitors don’t get to find out their awesome new features and then put out a better version. But in all seriousness, there’s a whole load of generic military shooters out there already — keeping the fact that New York gets attacked in one/both/all of them isn’t going to change that fact. Ironically, the most original titles are often the ones who are most open and humble about their innovations.

As a consumer, the constant parade of cock-teasers is inordinately frustrating and is causing me to shy further and further away from mainstream entertainment in my own free time. In recent years, the titles I’ve got most excited about are the ones that weren’t embargoed, the ones where developers were open about what they were up to and the ones where I could find out things about the game at my own pace by doing some research and trawling through developer websites — not by following some schedule that the marketing department had dreamed up. Recettear, Chantelise, Groove Coaster, Pocket Academy, Breath of Death VII, Cthulhu Saves the World, Dungeons of Dredmor, Minecraft — these are the games I’m excited about and it’s perhaps no coincidence that most of them are independently developed and published titles. All of them either suddenly appeared out of nowhere without months of cock-teasing, or were extensively documented by their creators during development. I can only imagine how satisfying it will be for Notch and his team when Minecraft is finally released to the public and they have a complete and public record of the entire development process which they can look back on and think “Yes. We did that.”

The only exception to this rule in my case is Catherine, which Atlus carefully drip-fed information out to the public about, but, notably, didn’t stop people talking about the Japanese version which had come out some months earlier — including a playable demo. By the time the reviews for the game came out, I’d already made up my mind — I wanted to play that game, and a review wasn’t going to change my mind. I’d played the Japanese demo and was intrigued by it. I was interested in seeing what the Persona team made of adult relationships, and I liked the idea of the story being married to something other than a typical JRPG. I felt like I was making an informed choice, not the choice that PR wanted me to make. Even then, as a European I still have to wait until Deep Silver bring the game over — by which time most of my American buddies will have played and beaten the game and will have already discussed it.

It’s difficult to say whether this situation will continue — it seems that most weeks I see journalist friends suffering some sort of embargo frustration, or gamer friends fed up with the constant prick-teasing of countdown sites and “exclusive reveals” during sports events they weren’t going to watch anyway. But it must at least be having an effect because it seems to be the model to follow these days.

I miss the days of bedroom programmers selling cassette tapes at car boot sales and type-in listings from magazines. Can we have those days back, please?